It's your argument that does not make economic sense because you seem to think that it's amateurs and hobbiests who are supplying the vast amounts of money to support the manufacture of products like this. Bourns (and every other electronics component manufacturer) survives by selling to commercial and industrial manufacturing who select and purchase components to build thing by the hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands. For the reasons I have already stated, they would never use or have need for something like this.
Even if industry prototyping itself had a use for these in prototyping, it would not be enough to support the manufacture of these things because prototypes are, by definition, small in number, and wouldn't be used very in the prototyping since at some point you want the prototype to reflect the end-result as closely as possible (aka use the components that will likely be in the end product).